Program note
Reverências (2009-2016)
Reverências is a cycle of pieces written in reference to the compositional languages of composers who have marked my formation years. The cycle counts today with three piano pieces in four hands, but it is continuous. The first piece is Abertura Soviet – for Dmitri Shostakovich, composed and premiered in 2009. The first theme is grandiose ouverture and the second is more intimate, this duality representing two historical facets of the life of this composer: on the one hand, the artist subject to the aesthetic rules of the State, compelled to express grandeur and vigor, but sounding somehow a little grotesque; On the other, the composer with his deepest free inspiration, composing secretly. The second piece, Adagio Misterioso – for Gustav Mahler, begins with variations on the motive I’ve called “magic chariot”, which is present in some works of the composer, as in the beginning of the Fourth Symphony. The language here refers to the late Romanticism and the transition to the twentieth Century, with the first steps towards atonality. The work unfolds as a fantasy, combining the pastoral and the mysterious, as well as some allusions to Wagner’s Tristan motif and Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and at the very end there is a brief quotation from the beginning of Mahler’s First Symphony. The third piece is entitled Dança do Menino Tuhú – for Heitor Villa-Lobos, and it has a playful, dancing and popular spirit, representing the tricks of the boy Tuhú, nickname of Heitor Villa-Lobos as a child. In the central part of the piece the spirit goes more emotional and is construed as quotation of the known piano piece “Brazilian Soul”. The whole cycle is impregnated with a tonal aesthetic with some touches of free atonality. The second and third pieces, composed from February to April 2016, which debut in this concert, have cyclic elements, absent in the first. These three pieces have a traditional formal structure, the musical language being purposefully more tonal and conservative, in order to establish an open dialogue with these three pillars of concert music of the twentieth Century. They are reverences to these masters, and references to my formation.
Premiere 03/05/2017 Duo Castelan & Barros Music Department Auditorium- UDESC
Abertura Soviet by Duo Corvisier, Festival Musica Nova, Ribeirão Preto Brasil, 13/12/2023
from 18:16 to 23:46
Listen to Adagio Misterioso